Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Mariblanca Sábas Alomá was an Ultraist feminist Cuban writer. She was involved with the first Congreso Nacional de Mujeres in Havana in 1923. Her work was published in El Cubano Libre, Diario de Cuba, Orto and El Sol in Havana. Sábas Alomá took literature courses in Mexico and also attended Colombia University in New York and Puerto Rico. She travelled throughout South America, worked as a journalist and editor, and was politically active as a communist and feminist.

Sabás Alomá’s 1920 article “Masculinismo, no. Feminismo!” was published recently in a volume of her essays, Feminismo. In 1928 she published an article in which she characterized lesbianism (“garzonismo”) as a crime against nature, encouraged by capitalism, that would disappear with the advent of true socialism; for her, feminism was in complete opposition to lesbianism (Menéndez).

In “Poema a una mujer aviadora,” Sábas Alomá spaces words freely across the page, leaping great distances in sweeping arcs, just as the aviator would zig-zag across the Atlantic. A later poet, the Argentine writer Elvira Hernández, might be paying homage to Sábas Alomá in her long poem “Carta de viaje,” both in form and in theme. Hernández describes a flight across the Atlantic from south to north, from Latin America to Northern Europe, focusing on the dislocated state of flying, not on land, sea, or earth, detatched from terrestrial metaphor.

Juana de Ibarbourou echoes the “shout” of Sabás Alomá in her 1930 poems “El grito,” “Las olas,” and “Atlántico” in which she longs to leap the distance between the world of the real and the world of ideals.

WOMAN woman aviator who wants to cross in one bound t h e a t l a n t i cwoman in the engine falling into step with a red flagand a song that's COMMUNISTin order to cleanse everything soiled from the ambition that throws you at the conquestof distance enormouswoman you don't ascend through coquetryyou ascend because the intense clamor of people who sufferl e n d s y o u w i n g swoman you stretch above the marine vastness that

S E P A R A T E S two continents the fraternal arch that in the same longing for JUSTICEfor America and for Europewoman from a height of 2,000 meterslet fall across the sea and across the landT H E N E W W O R D so that we'll see it in the night a zig zag trailo f j u b i l a n t c o n s t e l l a t i o n swoman hidden in the cabin of your airplane is the S H O U T– sacred–and–signal of the young America– A N T I M P E R I A L I S Tand drive it home – so that all Europe will see it andthe multitudes of RUSSIA will make their comradely greetings the normON THE HIGHEST PEAK OF THE EIFFEL TOWERwoman if your dream breaks on the song of a waveyou won't arrive at the domains of what's undiscoveredpraying–our father, who art in heaven– not conforming to the rule of the watchful proletariatswith a RISE UP, POOR OF THE EARTH STAND UP, SLAVES WITHOUT BREAD . . .